Every time I thought about posting something here I got depressed and wandered off somewhere else. I have had friends working at Henry's back when I was into film SLRs. Even within the last 10 years I knew one "old timer" who got back in the business who was at one of their stores for a while. It is hard for me to find anything good that happened since Cranbrook took over. It would be interesting to find out who those people are. Do any of them have any background in photography? I think I might make a few short posts with specific criticisms and maybe even a compliment where appropriate. If nothing else, other stores might learn a bit from what I have to say:
About Their Website Interface:
Go back about five years and Henry's web interface was like
B&H's. It had "x" items on a page and then you could go to the next page. You could open a page for an item in a new tab and go back and forth between tabs. Then you could open another item in another tab and go back and forth to compare the items. It worked well for comparison shopping. I often shop this way. Also, if you knew the website well enough (not hard), you could skip pages. If you open the "Mirrorless Lens" page in price order "low to high" you can skip pages of lens adapters. And long lists don't bog down. Now with the new web pages, a search results in an "infinite length" page that gets added to at the bottom. This is painful at best because if you search for lenses, well, they better have a lot of lenses because if they didn't, then why would I bother looking at their site at all? So you end up scrolling and scrolling and the page gets slower and slower and then you find something that looks interesting and click on it (it will NOT OPEN INTO A NEW TAB) and read what it has to say. Then your only option is to click the back button to continue and guess what? The page takes a really long time to reformat again, probably losing the pictures for the items and possibly crashing, forcing you to start over again. This is not good. What is baffling is that they don't seem to realize how bad this is. Don't any of the Cranbrook people actually buy anything online? Haven't they seen it? It is so obviously a disaster that only a complete idiot could miss the problems. And they could have rolled it back to the old style website long ago.
B&H still uses their old website, and that is where I do more "browsing".
On the topic of Websites, around the time of the Covid-19 lock down they dropped the "Used" pages from the Website. I don't know if that was because of the Covid-19 lock down, but as of last week, the stores were supposedly open again and I don't see the "Used" pages on the website back yet.
